Experiments on Stereo Visual Odometry in Feature-Less Volcanic Fields

This paper describes a stereo visual odometry system for volcanic fields which lack visual features on the ground. There are several technical problems in untextured terrain including the diversity of terrain appearance, the lack of welltracked features on surfaces, and the limited computational resources of onboard computers. This paper tries to address these problems and enable efficient and accurate visual localization independently of terrain appearance. Several key techniques are presented including a framework for terrain adaptive feature detection and a motion estimation method using fewer feature points. Field experiments have been conducted in volcanic fields for validation and evaluation of the system effectiveness and efficiency.